Journal

One of my great-great uncles, Norman Martin
Gibbins, was a Cambridge mathematician and chess aficionado whose main claim to
fame was a paper he published in The
Mathematical Gazette in 1944 entitled ‘Chess in Three and Four Dimensions.’
During the First World War, after being wounded as an infantry officer on the
Western Front, he’d worked as a cipher officer for military intelligence in
London, a precursor of the Bletchley Park codebreakers a generation later.
After the war as Headmaster of Central Foundation School in London’s East End he
influenced a generation of Jewish immigrant boys who went on to become mathematicians
themselves, including Jacob Bronowski and Daniel Pedoe, infecting the former
with his passion for chess and publishing many chess solutions with him over
subsequent years.

Norman’s specialization was geometry, and
I’ve often wondered whether his fascination with the dimensional possibilities
of chess was fuelled by his experience of the First World War, not so much
through his work in intelligence as by what he saw in the trenches with the
Royal Dublin Fusiliers in 1916 and 1917. This was very much in my mind when I
recently watched the excellent The Somme:
Secret Tunnel Wars (BBC4). In it, the presenter Peter Barton takes us on an
extraordinary journey deep into the tunnels dug by the Royal Engineers in front
of the village of La Boiselle, one of the key objectives of the disastrous
first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. These were not single saps, but were
labyrinthine complexes on multiple levels, as if the tunnelers were recreating
the coal mines in England from which many had been recruited. All of the
digging was done by hand – or, more accurately, by feet, by ‘clay-pushers’ –
and in utter silence, to avoid detection by the Germans as they counter-sapped
from the other side. The tunneling was
ostensibly in support of the war above, to lay mines under enemy positions, but
soon attained a ghastly dynamic of its own, with tunnelers blowing each other
up and breaking through to fight to the death in the darkness with clubs and
knives. It was truly war in another dimension, an analogue of the conflict overhead
but with a particular horror for the participants that can rarely have been
matched in warfare since.

I’m fascinated by the detritus of war, but
seeing archaeological work on the Western Front has sometimes left me with a
tinge of unease, particularly in Picardy, where the beauty and richness of the
farmland seems the best memorial to those who fell there, and where to cut into
the land might seem to damage the sanctity of the place. Perhaps it’s the diver
in me, used to respecting shipwrecks as war graves and not disturbing them; the
fields of Picardy after all are a mass war grave, not only to the 71,000
missing men named on the Thiepval Monument but also to many thousands on the
German side. Perhaps also it’s because the
war to me still seems immediate, almost within living memory; my grandfather,
like Norman Gibbins a veteran of the Somme and Passchendaele, lived until I was
in my mid-twenties and I grew up with his memories of the war. For me, seeing the remains of trenches dug
up, with decaying artefacts and the inevitable discovery of body parts, has
sometimes seemed not only to add little to our knowledge of that war but
actually to diminish it, like returning to the scenes of one’s own memories
that are often best left unvisited.

My feelings though were very different on
watching the La Boiselle tunnels being opened up. Here, instead of digging into
a healed landscape, it was as if a bandage were being stripped off a raw wound,
exposing the tunnels exactly as they had been left that day when the British
troops finally overran the village and all of the efforts underground became
redundant, superfluous to history. The archaeologists went down wearing
breathing equipment in case pockets of methane gas still remained from the mine
explosions in 1916. The presenter likened it to walking into their own version
of King Tut’s tomb, and there was something jarring, shocking even, about the
idea of going into a place where the gas and the smell of that war lingers on,
and still has the ability to kill.

My grandfather told me that his experiences
on the Western Front taught him the futility of war. To some, that common reaction of veterans might seem to deny the historical inevitability
of a European war, or that it would be fought on the Western Front in the way
that it was. But I think for those who were there the true meaning of futility
was not in the overall scheme of things – the wider picture that soldiers rarely
saw, yet which dominates our sense of that war – but in their experience of day-to-day
endeavours which so often failed in their objectives., with calamitous results.

There can be few more awful instances than
the final story of the La Boiselle tunnels. In the lead-up to the opening of
the Somme battle on 1 July 1916, the tunnelers were tasked with laying an
enormous mine beneath a German machine-gun nest on the edge of the village. But
the day before, a German listening post able to detect telephone transmissions
heard a British officer wish another good luck for the following day. Suspecting
that mines were to be detonated, the Germans moved their machine-guns to another
position, one that actually provided better enfilading fire across the fields
adjacent to the village. After the mine was blown and the smoke had cleared the
British infantry advanced into a hail of bullets, suffering more than 5,000
casualties in that sector on the first day alone. Instead of being the walkover
that the underground mining was meant to facilitate, La Boiselle became one of
the costliest objectives of the entire Somme front.

The truth of history often lies in the
details, and the remarkable work of the archaeologists at La Boiselle gives
vivid meaning to the memories of those who experienced that war, whether it be
a fascination with the geometry and dimensions of conflict or a numbed sense of
waste and futility.